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Brigitta Sipocz

Interests

My main interest is in developing open source astronomy software. I'm keen to find ways to promote the open development model to make these tools more sustainable.

My work

Spending my early years as an amateur astronomer, I have always been an enthusiastic observer. Working with telescopes and astronomical observations were the major sources of motivation to pursue a degree and a career in astronomy. During my MSc and PhD studies, I was working on projects to look for planets beyond our Solar System. However, over the years I grew a deep interest in scientific software development, too.

Staring with a Google Summer of Code internship, I became heavily involved in community software development, where I mainly contribute to the widely used astropy Python package and other Astropy affiliated packages. Currently I hold several official roles within the project such as being the lead release coordinator, and maintainer of several packages.

These open-source, openly-developed projects gave me the opportunity to gain a deep knowledge of modern software development methodology, frameworks, and best practices.

The Fellowship provides an excellent opportunity to promote these practices as a way to achieve a more sustainable, reproducible and collaborative software product and ultimately open science.

I will organize meetings to foster collaborations and interoperation between astronomy python packages. I also aim to be involved in hack days and to advocate summer of code opportunities for science students.